City of Sunnyvale

When I have interviewed former orchardists or those who were children of fruit farmers in Sunnyvale, their story is very often a nostalgic one hearkening back to what Sunset Magazine dubbed in 1912 the “Valley of Heart’s Delight” with its 8,000,000 blossoming trees carpeting the valley floor.

The world these people grew up in has utterly vanished. So they remember and describe in vivid detail the trees, the farm life, the taste and the look of the fruit, the process of harvesting the fruit, getting it ready for sale, and the return to normal life after “the season.”

As a historian, it is my job to hear and record the memories and then compare them to data from other sources—like statistics of fruit crop production, labor records, numbers of acres in a given fruit, and general historical trends.

The orchard era in the Santa Clara Valley was actually very brief. The transformation of the valley landscape from 1,000-plus-acre wheat, grain and cattle ranches to small (less than 100 acres) fruit orchards did not begin until the 1880s. By 1950 it was clear that there was no future in fruit farming in the valley. Only seventy years. Historically speaking, what seemed like “the way it always was” to the orchard families, was actually very brief.

In 1900 there were over 3,000 farms in the valley with less than 100 acres. And many of those were as small as ten acres. They primarily belonged to immigrants from Spain, Portugal, Italy, France, and Croatia. The Chinese and Japanese in the valley were prohibited from owning land by the Alien Land Law of 1913. Some got around the law by having the land purchased in the name of their American-born children.

As these new immigrant farmers produced a fruit crop, the canning and drying industries grew up alongside the orchards. The farmer could sell the crop directly to the public via a fruit stand, sell to a cannery, or a dry-yard. Very few had the wherewithal to market directly to the public, except on a very small scale.

The margin of profit for a fruit farmer was very narrow so they began to form cooperatives and sell their fruit together. One of these was Sunsweet—formerly the Prune and Apricot Growers’ Association. Farmers also banded together to buy orchard equipment and supplies. Orchard Supply Hardware, today a chain of hardware stores, started off as a farmers’ cooperative in an attempt to keep costs down.

Cherries were the first crop of the season, ready for picking around Memorial Day. One former Sunnyvale farmer, told me, “Cherries were the Cadillac of everything.” In other words, the most prized product, and they were arguably the best cherries ever produced anywhere in the world.

Apricots were harvested around the 4^th of July, and like cherries were picked from the tree. Some of the crop was sold fresh, some went to the cannery, and a huge portion was cut and spread on trays to dry in the sun. In the middle of July, acres and acres of apricot trays lay out in the summer sun.

Everyone helped cutting the ‘cots—young children, old men and women, teenagers looking for a summer job, and migrant workers. At the end of the season, when the cut was done, the cutting-shed supervisor who was often the farmer’s wife, would provide a party for the crew—ice cream or watermelon or a cook-out.

Prune harvest came in around Labor Day, and was the most grueling work of all because prunes are picked up off the ground after being shaken from the tree. Child labor was crucial to this operation, and on many occasions, the start of the school year was delayed so that children could work the prune harvest. Even when school opened on schedule, enrollment jumped when prune season was over.

Labor was a huge issue for orchard families. It did not take very many trees to make it necessary for a family to need outside help to harvest their fruit. Migrant workers from Mexico or victims of the 1930s dust bowl known as the “Okies” were often hired to harvest the fruit. Some people that I have interviewed recall what fun it was when the migrant families arrived summer after summer, because they always brought lots of children—new playmates for the season. They remember the families “camping out” in the orchard.

But in many cases the “camp out” was not a choice. There was no where else for these families to live while they were in the valley to harvest the crop. There were no toilets, they used empty fruit crates as a makeshift roof, they cooked over a fire, and water for all day in the orchard was carried in a glass Mason jar. It got very hot, they got terrible sunburns, and there were ten-hour days of work for all family members. Many of these families did not have a home waiting for them at the end of the season either. The migrant workers went on to pick an asparagus crop in Sacramento or a strawberry crop in Watsonville.

The post-World War II population boom in the Santa Clara Valley brought the end to the agricultural era here. A few farmers held out, some even for decades. But by and large, orcharding was an occupation of the past by the late 1950s. One man told me that although he hasn’t farmed in forty years, he still gets a sick feeling in his stomach when there is an unseasonable rain late in May—it would wreck the apricot crop.

Sunnyvale Historical Eras:
Agriculture • Defense • High-Tech

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